Folks,
Airgead Studio has gone carbon neutral.
The IT industry has had some bad press over the last few years and much of that criticism is well deserved. The industry uses a massive amount of power and there really hasn't been much effort to reduce that.
Here at Airgead Studio we are doing our (very small) bit to try to redress the balance.
Our office runs on 100% renewable energy and we have tried to minimise our energy usage by insulating the office, which reduces the need for air-conditioning and heating. We have also installed a "green wall" of deciduous fruit trees on the northern and western sides of the office to shade the building in summer and let the sun through in winter. The fact that they produce a bumper crop of fruit each year is an added bonus.
Our servers are hosted in the US and the datacentre we use does not run on renewables. To cover the CO2 emissions from our servers, we purchase offsets for 100% of the power we use to run the servers and associated cooling. The offsets we use are all accredited and go towards building new renewable energy projects in Australia and the developing world. You can view our offset certificate by clicking here.
We also try to reduce our impact in other ways as well.
We try not to travel too much and when we do, public transport is our first choice.
Hot water is provided by a solar system on the roof, which requires minimal, off-peak power to run and on most sunny days uses no power at all.
We use the minimum amount of paper that we can and when we do need to use it, we use recycled wherever possible.
All office paper waste is either recycled or shredded and composted.
The compost is then used to grow organic vegetables in our garden.
In case you are wondering where the water for the garden comes from (since Australia is in an almost-permanent drought these days), we have a 5000L water tank which provides 100% of the water we need for the garden.
Our plans for the future include a photovoltaic system on the roof to supply our power off-grid, and additional water tanks for toilet flushing and other non-drinking uses.
One of our aims is to show that you can run a successful business in a sustainable manner. If you are interested in running a green business and want some advice, or already run one and want to tell us about how we can do things better, get in touch.
Cheers
Dave
